Happy Freedom, America. Here's How Close We Are to Losing It.

First, let’s thank the universe that Donald Trump does not care half a shit about American history.

He couldn’t tell the Federalist Papers from Charmin, except that the guy hired to wipe his ass might use either. As a WWE Hall of Famer, he exudes a far deeper connection to the lore of pro wrestling, an American tradition, along with white supremacy, unchecked greed, and lustful exploitation, that he is grounded in. Yes, he loves monuments, especially Mt. Rushmore, only intuiting the craggy origins of that megalith. And he only loves it because he knows other people love it, and it offers a granite celebration of his ego’s ambition, to be a white demigod lurking above all, unassailable, revered by all, but for reasons even he couldn’t be bothered to articulate.

To anyone who actually loves America, he’s an anti-patriot.

He’s the personification of everything we’ve aspired to overcome at our best. We built a janky prototype of democracy, ended slavery, and won rights over the objections of concentrated capital. Right now we’re struggling, and often failing, to survive as the world’s great multiracial democracy.

And, in this moment, I’m grateful that Donald Trump’s deepest thoughts about Lexington and Concord would involve a golf course where he could collect bribes.

A more eager fascist, JD Vance, would have used this quarter-millennium mark to retell America’s story from the point of view of the know-nothings, the enslavers, and those who want to bring back both. Instead, we just get corruption and a literal celebration of that corruption and the ability to get away with corruption, while looting basic necessities from the poorest Americans.

But as a genuine patriot and amateur history geek, I must get aboard the ghost of the horse Paul Revere borrowed to warn us all: the worst is coming, and it’s closer than you’ve been led to believe. We know the president wants to be a king, a dictator. And we know the thing that’s keeping him from that sort of power, thus far, is incompetence, his own and those who gravitate to him as a vessel for their worst ambitions.

So, on our 250th birthday, here’s what’s missing from the embarrassing deluge of fireworks lighting up Washington, DC, as Trump bathes in a spectacle he hopes will drown out all sense and meaning.

1. THE MATH ON GETTING OUT IS WORSE THAN YOU THINK

You’ve surely heard of the 3.5% rule, which Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan found to be the threshold for the success of a nonviolent challenge to topple a government during a peak event involving at least 3.5% of its population. Since we’ve all learned that rule, we’ve learned the exceptions and that, in the last two decades, there has been a marked decline in the success of movements described by this rule, which had once seemed almost infallible.

Ami Fields-Meyer spent two years interviewing dissidents across five continents for On Courage, the book he wrote with Julia Angwin. The book quickly offers context from political scientists Claire Trilling and Jonathan Pinckney, who tracked decades of countries sliding into authoritarianism, sorting them by what they tried on the way back out. Countries that relied only on the normal tools (voting, suing, legislating) climbed back to democracy seven percent of the time. That’s seven percent. A batting average of .070, which would get a major leaguer sent back to middle school.

But! Countries that added a civil resistance movement on top of that (strikes, boycotts, sand in the gears of the state) climbed back fifty-one percent of the time. Seven to fifty-one is the difference between a country that stays lost and a coin flip on getting it back.

It also tracks with what Erica Chenoweth has documented for years. Strikes and boycotts disrupt a government’s ability to function. Marches by themselves mostly prove that people are angry. Angwin and Fields-Meyer cite political scientist Maria J. Stephan for the name of the ingredient that turns the seven into the fifty-one: collective stubbornness, people increasing the cost of authoritarian behavior together, expanding the circle at the exact moment instinct says to shrink it.



It’s a skill. But it’s a skill that must be practiced and aspired to by those courageous enough to stand up to the regime. Thankfully, there are millions of us. That’s what the regime is intent on changing.

2. THE REGIME SKIPPED A STEP, AND NOW THEY’RE CIRCLING BACK

Every dictatorship that established a camp system first focused on crushing its opponents. Andrea Pitzer drew on her global history of concentration camps to lay out the sequence on the new episode of Next Comes What above.

The Bolsheviks built the Cheka the month after they took power in 1917 and spent years grinding down every rival before the Gulag became the wall-to-wall system the world remembers. The Nazis took five years: Dachau opened in March 1933, and the mass roundups of German Jews didn’t start until Kristallnacht in 1938.

Trump’s goons skipped that step. They spent 2025 expanding ICE and buying up warehouses for a mass camp system while a functioning opposition was still standing, organized, and capable of showing up.

“They got out over their skis in trying to do a massive expansion of concentration camps and put target groups in them before they had shut down their political opposition,” she said.

That skipped step explains the year we just had leading up to the invasion of Minnesota. The sandwich-throwing prosecution collapsed into a punchline, and a not-guilty verdict typified how the regime was spreading more laughs than fear.

But that’s changing.

A green-card holder who wasn’t even at the protest is serving 30 years for moving a box of zines, while a codefendant who fired a gun at an officer got a hundred years, longer than anyone got for January 6th, while NSPM-7 orders the FBI to comb through five years of old intelligence files for cases to build after the fact. Marcy Wheeler has detailed how the regime is using conspiracy charges to try to criminalize any opposition to Trump.

We’re getting report after report of ICE fixating on crushing dissent as they ramp up their deportation numbers, targeting Americans for their speech, accusing peaceful protests of being threats or the amorphous crime of doxing.

“I’ve been saying now for more than a year that the administration has overshot what it could get away with for now,” Pitzer says. She warns that the mistake of focusing on round-ups over taking the spine out of the opposition has led us to a course correction that will make the next four months the “most dangerous time in decades.”

3. THE LAST BIG GUARDRAIL ON BUYING ELECTIONS HAD BEEN OBLITERATED

Last Tuesday, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in National Republican Senatorial Committee v. FEC that caps on coordinated spending between political parties and their own candidates violate the First Amendment. Justice Kavanaugh wrote the majority opinion. Before this week, a party could spend only a capped amount coordinating directly with its own candidate: as little as $65,300 for a House race, up to $4 million for a Senate seat. That cap is gone for both parties, starting with this fall’s midterms.

It’s the same argument Lewis Powell wrote into Buckley v. Valeo in 1976: money is speech, so limiting money limits speech. Citizens United applied it to corporations in 2010. McCutcheon applied it to aggregate contribution limits in 2014. Tuesday applied it to the last wall standing between a national party and a single candidate’s own campaign account.

The Trillionaire Kill Chain’s whole argument is that American fascism starts as a campaign finance story: buy the infrastructure, and the infrastructure buys you back.

Musk spent $291 million and got a dozen federal investigations dismissed. Then he passed go and collected a trillion dollars. Every state party in the country can now hand a favored candidate unlimited coordinated cash with no dollar figure attached to embarrass anyone. The 2026 midterms are the first election run under the fully open version of the rule Powell wrote fifty years ago.

WHAT DECIDES THIS ISN’T THE ODDS

Political scientists Jean Lachapelle and Sebastian Hellmeier did something more useful than predict the outcome of any single uprising. They matched dozens of authoritarian collapses since 1945 against each other by what a country can’t change in a five-year window: wealth, military size, democratic history. Then they found cases that started from nearly identical positions and ended in opposite places. The Philippines in 1986 and Benin in 1990 became democracies. Burma, structurally almost indistinguishable, did not.

The choices decided it. The Philippines kept its coalition broad enough to include reform-minded military factions, even during coup attempts against the new government. Benin’s organizers refused to let their National Conference splinter along ethnic lines, and the country’s small military stayed out of it entirely. Burma’s opposition, which offered a flawed but real path to elections in 1988, rejected it, split into armed struggle in the jungle, and watched the junta rule for another twenty-three years.

America turns 250 as a country that, on paper, confounds scholars of authoritarianism: high wealth, functioning institutions, no current civil war, and a military with no history of coups.

But Donald Trump doesn’t know or care about that history. And that’s one of the greatest assets in his quest to undo our freedom. Institutions, traditions, and values that transcend time mean nothing to him. All he cares about is power: manifesting more of that, punishing anyone he perceives as an enemy, and being celebrated for doing it.

History to him is whatever the last person whispered in his ear. And that is usually Stephen Miller, whose Klan-ified revisionism of this country’s story requires undoing everything that wasn’t written to valorize white men at the expense of everyone else.

Miller wants to own the nation’s memory, deciding who gets remembered as a builder and who gets erased as a threat. A country that lets one man edit its past will believe whatever he tells it about its future.

But the American story is that the people will decide the future.

We can declare our independence, form a more perfect union, and celebrate a new birth of freedom. We can do this any time there are enough of us who have won enough of a standing to do these things together, for and with each other. And that’s something that Donald Trump will never understand. But we must make sure that he learns his impotence before that kind of power, before it perishes from the earth.

So let's remember who we can and must be:

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